21 ms·

The video game industry can't go on like this

• onion2k 7y ago
  People have been saying this for about 35 years. Back in the 80s Imagine hyped two games called Psyclapse and Bandersnatch saying they were groundbreaking, huge, and really expensive to make. They were never released and stories of the devs working long hours and sleeping under desks came out. There have been similar games and stories every year since then. The story of the Bandersnatch game is the basis of the Black Mirror episode of the same name. The writer, Charlie Brooker, is a big gaming fan.
  • Joe-Z 7y ago
    That piece of trivia was more interesting than the article to me. Thank you! :)
  • mrguyorama 7y ago
    It's really convenient that you picked your start date to be right after the Video Game Crash of 1983. I'm not sure we would ever see anything like that again. The fact of the matter is that the big names like EA and Ubisoft make boatloads of money and aren't in danger of losing it. Mass appeal games and the audiences they cater to are surprisingly un-finicky
    • whymauri 7y ago
      I think the next major crash in video games will be e-sports. And I love e-sports (three time TI attendee). As Peter Dager (ppd), ex-CEO of Evil Genius and industry professional says best: >Esports is a phenomenon brought on by the introduction of the internet, it does not have to be run the same way that professional sports operate. Many professional sports do not expect to fill a stadium. 99% of our audience is online and prefer to sit in their rooms on their PCs so lets please focus our resources on improving the broadcast and player/talent treatment. Too many irresponsible “businessmen” have latched on to esports over the past couple of years and have convinced billionaires that they are sitting on top of a golden egg. Yes esports is new, yes it is exciting to be at the front of an emerging industry but you are setting everyone else who is to follow up for failure by creating unrealistic standards and expectations. >The [e-sports] audience is not going to grow immensely, let’s build sustainable events so we can continue to enjoy the game we love so much. I think if investor expectations are not well-managed, this is going to cause an e-sports 'winter' if you will. If this happens, it's definitely going to affect some major game-changing genres like MOBAs and some FPSs. I genuinely feel like it could cause a huge stumble for AAA companies.
    • flukus 7y ago
      > It's really convenient that you picked your start date to be right after the Video Game Crash of 1983. The examples given were UK companies who had a thriving industry at the time, the video game crash was mostly an American thing. The globalization of the industry has been important to it's success.
  • NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    Hey, it worked out OK though. Hmm, better than OK. Shovelware Imagine went bust, someone bought the rights, and they were part of the team that formed Psygnosis. So we got much better software, and more Roger Dean cover art. Bandersnatch eventually came out from Psygnosis, Psyclapse was, IIRC, total vapourware - just an advert. I can only hope shovelware EA et al go the same way. :)
  • egypturnash 7y ago
    Imagine had a lot of other problems at the time, like “not actually having any money”.
• Joe-Z 7y ago
  That‘s an environmentalism article luring you in with how single player games have developed in the last 10 years. Nothing against environmentalism but I was hoping to read more about how actual game development will change and not the same topics that every other technology company faces equally due to climate change and the resulting policies to mitigate it.
  • noobermin 7y ago
    To be honest, if one is concerned with environmentalism, addressing automobile dependency will do a lot more for the environment than addressing data center[1] electricity usage's contribution to GHG's which has, ironically, lessened over the last decade[0]. [0] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis... [1] EDIT: Total electricity usage(for both industry AND commercial/residential) is actually a big contributor to GHG's still, but it's declining and a lot of things, like the reply points out, contribute to it, chiefly things like air conditioning and heating during the winter.
    • daxfohl 7y ago
      Not to mention it sounds like he's arguing against data center driven games. Which seems like the wrong thing to argue against. Add up all the energy used by the consoles and TVs and I'd imagine it dwarfs the data center energy.
      • Nasrudith 7y ago
        The transmission and encoding/decoding is probably significant however even if the processing may be more efficient in bulk- look at streaming vs downloaded energy useage for one. But it is still probably a win over retail distribution.
        • daxfohl 7y ago
          And that said, talking energy to entertainment ratio, I'd think the proliferation of giant screen televisions that are just on all the time would be an even larger concern.
• theandrewbailey 7y ago
  > In 2008, those three publishers released 98 games; in 2018 they released just 28, not including expansions. In short, the single-player game was not sustainable. So why should we think the current model is? The single player game was 'dead' because video game companies decided they were dead, not because of any market forces. They realized that games with multiplayer features sold a bit better, so they decided to focus on those, to the point of (mostly) abandoning single player games. Big publishers decided to make fewer, bigger games. But indies (and other mid-tier devs) filled a huge market gap (Kickstarter, anyone?), so nothing really changed much.
  • CM30 7y ago
    Also because multiplayer games are easy to implement dodgy monetisation methods in. Few people would consider paying for lootboxes/microtransactions/whatever in a single player game, whereas a decent percentage (unfortunately) would for a multiplayer one. By comparison, DLC for a single player game is often more effort and a one off deal.
    • brianpgordon 7y ago
      They tried their damnedest with Middle-earth: Shadow of War! Critics didn't seem to mind very much but the Metacritic user score tells you what the community thought about being coerced into buying lootboxes to finish a single-player game.
      • hi5eyes 7y ago
        >Critics didn't seem to mind very much yongyea and jim sterling disagree dont know about whatever gamespot/ign have been saying but they're becoming irrelevant
    • ReidZB 7y ago
      The latest Assassin's Creed games have single-player microtransactions. It's crazy: https://kotaku.com/ubisoft-explains-assassin-s-creed-odyssey-s-microtransa-1829635195 https://kotaku.com/ubisoft-explains-assassin-s-creed-odyssey... For instance, you could buy things like XP boosters, unique-appearance gear, map unlocks, etc. Though if I remember correctly, you could pretty easily use Cheat Engine to give yourself as much of the microtransaction currency as you wanted—after all, it was a single-player game.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• denkmoon 7y ago
  For those of us that don't care for the latest FPS or Battle Royale, the games industry is going perfectly fine. Never before has it been so easy for someone to get their game into the hands of millions. Games like Factorio, made by people who are passionate about games. With modern distribution platforms, companies like Paradox Interactive find it viable to continue adding content to their games many years after they were released. Couldn't give two hoots about what EA and Activision are up to. They don't make games for me.
  • Lowkeyloki 7y ago
    I agree 100%. However, people like us are the minority somehow.
    • Iv 7y ago
      People who enjoyed video games used to be a weird minority as well. If a niche is sane it can grow to become the majority way of doing things.
    • thecatspaw 7y ago
      Maybe we're the minority. Still, wube (factorio developers) seem to be living comfortably, they don't seem to be hurting for cash. There is enough money in niche communities if your product is good
      • NeedMoreTea 7y ago
        Getting there is more challenging than it used to be. Plenty of non-AAA hits seem to come with tales of development almost breaking them, or running out of Kickstarter funds. Including two of my favourites: Pillars of Eternity and Divinity Original Sin. I'm sure there's plenty that didn't make it too.
      • UncleMeat 7y ago
        Survivor bias. How many great indie games never got the exposure and died on steam making basically nothing. The fact that some people can do alright is not evidence of a healthy market.
• personjerry 7y ago
  This is click bait. The author points out some trends in gaming and then suddenly jumps to the conclusion that "this can't go on forever".
• verisimilitudes 7y ago
  This is drivel that doesn't warrant a comprehensive critique, so I must be really bored. >At about this time next year, we’ll have a pretty good idea of what the next generation of video games will look like. The current Sony and Microsoft consoles seemed to have few games worth owning and then released incompatible versions recently, yet a new version is warranted? >as studios shuttered, developers burned out, and toxic work culture fostered environments hostile to marginalized people. The only one of these that's valid is the developer overworking. A studio closing and ''sexism'' don't even come close, but anything to conflate the real issues, I suppose. >When you adjust for inflation, the retail cost of video games has never been cheaper, and it’s been this way for some time. The $60 price point for a standard big-budget release has held steady for nearly 15 years, unadjusted for inflation even as the cost to make big-budget video games has risen astronomically with player expectations. Sixty dollars is already high enough for a game and yet the next few paragraphs discuss ways companies increase the price by selling an incomplete product. Well, if the price ever rises, these companies would have no reason to stop, so you'd have higher prices and the same garbage. Anyone who tells you the price of a product such as this really isn't enough is likely a mindless drone. >In short, the single-player game was not sustainable. So why should we think the current model is? Why should I care if a type of video game is deemed ''sustainable''; what makes this claim valid, anyway? If there are games that don't appeal to me, I won't purchase them. Why would I ever think ''Gee, there aren't any new games that appeal to me; I guess I'll buy one that doesn't.'' when there is such a breadth of video games over several decades? That would be like buying a fashion magazine because the book store didn't have any programming books you wanted. If only ''Indie'' groups are releasing games I want, why would that be an issue? >In short, the single-player game was not sustainable. So why should we think the current model is? If you're a capitalist, you can only figure the market will eventually correct itself, on its own, so why care? The article then spends several paragraphs discussing climate issues, which are irrelevant. >Video games cannot do this forever. If any of these things were to collapse—the people who make them, the economy they’re sold in, the ecosystem we’re all a part of—it would be catastrophic. All of them at once? That’s a disaster we need to talk about, openly. Because there are solutions to these problems. Again, why should anyone care, considering the breadth of current games available? Should I give a damn if a publisher is struggling, considering there are more books, and about topics I like at that, than I could ever read in my lifetime? The article then suggests all of the children and men with nothing better to do who regularly read Kotaku call their politicians about climate issues. The last few paragraphs of this article are a mess. >It’s unlikely that video games will ever truly go extinct. We’ll probably always have something called “video games,” but what those games will look like is still very much in flux. There’s no guarantee that the way games are currently made will remain viable for another 10 years—games aren’t even made today the same way they were 10 years ago. This is such a stupid paragraph. This is clearly written for a lowbrow audience they expect to easily manipulate. >They will look different. They will change because they can, and because they must. Hopefully, all the ways games change will be on our terms—otherwise disaster will change them for us. This is an entertainment medium, one that has a lot of garbage in it, at that. This is about video games and some idiot was paid to write this. In closing, this isn't a great critique, but the article was garbage. I dislike there were enough cretins to put this on the front page, while interesting material written by interesting people goes entirely ignored. Those are my thoughts.
• tus88 7y ago
  I wonder what another Great Games Crash would even look like. Publishers go out of business but platforms like Steam prosper as they already have more superb games that anyone can play in a lifetime? And what would be the resurrection of the industry? Who knows, but I sort of agree with the sentiment that something is about to give.
  • badpun 7y ago
    In a hypothetical scenario where all publishers go out of business, it would be hard to see how much the sales decline overall - i.e. how much sales was driven purely by marketing and how much is people really wanting to buy and play video games.
• sien 7y ago
  This is not the graph of industry revenue for an industry that "can't go on like this". https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/graph/png/Video_game_industry/0/f85d13c567f225f5e4fc8fd52f98c3f775e42591.png https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/graph/png/Video_ga... The game industry is probably in better health than book publishing, music, film or TV. For consumer the plethora of things available has never been greater.
  • calpaterson 7y ago
    Revenue is not the same as profit. It is possible to sell a lot of something and not make much profit.
    • falcor84 7y ago
      Agreed, but revenue is the clearest indicator of consumer interest. As long as the revenue is growing, there's no real risk that companies would stop making games.
      • bogwog 7y ago
        Unless, as is probably the case here, most of that revenue comes from preying on people with gambling addiction through lootboxes, psychological manipulation, peer pressure, etc. When that stuff gets banned, revenue will tank and any developer completely reliant on that will be in big trouble.
        • ryandrake 7y ago
          Is it really inevitable that these things will one day be banned? If anything the USA is moving more and more toward liberalizing gambling. Casinos and card rooms are no longer limited to just Atlantic City and Vegas, online poker is slowly marching toward legalization state-by-state. Sports betting is opening up. If anything, I see video games and casino gambling industries slowly merging over the next ten years or so, borrowing profitable ideas from each other and overlapping their audiences.
  • 7y ago
• FrozenVoid 7y ago
  The future isn't about "buying games" or "cloud gaming subscriptions". It will be a form of mobile/casual gaming overtaking interest of mainstream gaming culture by providing similar quality of expirience in the browser, for free. Its likely will look like self-contained web games, utilizing WebGL+WebAssembly and procedurally generated assets on the client side. It would be powered by ads, microtransactions and donations, without "sale" or "subscription" paradigm - just load the webpage and play.
  • Freak_NL 7y ago
    > for free. […] powered by ads, microtransactions and donations So, not actually for free.
    • FrozenVoid 7y ago
      In free-to-play model, you don't have to pay anything. You can block ads, ignore microtranactions and don't donate anything, so its essentially free.
      • drucik 7y ago
        Well, when the game is designed around microtransactions free to play means more free to pay, as playing without paying is not enjoyable at all. Look at EAs mobile offerings.
  • throwaway2048 7y ago
    If mobile games were going to replace traditional games, they already would have, the cellphone market is already nearing replacement purchase rates. Gaming is a huge market, there is room for lots of niches, and the quality of even a typical native indie game is way way above what a browser is capable of delivering. Show me even one web game that is close to the quality of a mediocre graphics, reasonably expansive indie game The web sucks horribly as a platform if you care about performance, which even relatively low power indie games do.
• JamesBarney 7y ago
  This article is all over the place. It's about the reduction of single player games, nevermind it's about the the move to cloud gaming, surprise it's about Google's data center energy production, just kidding it about developer work environments, nope just the environment.
  • dougmwne 7y ago
    It reads like the primal scream of a game journalist who's written one too many outrage porn pieces.
    • hmhrex 7y ago
      Welcome to Kotaku!
    • khawkins 7y ago
      It's the abject desperation of a media group in full tail-spin. Not only is their journalism constantly in the mud but their jobs are in constant peril. They're projecting the tanking of their own industry onto the industry they cover. The Gizmodo media group, including Gizmodo, Jezebel, Deadspin, Lifehacker, Splinter, The Root, Kotaku, Earther, and Jalopnik, were all bought for $135 million in 2016 and were recently purchased again for "much less" [0]. A generous assumption is that Kotaku is worth around $15 million back then and around $8 million now. [0] https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/08/great-hill-partners-acquires-gizmodo/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/08/great-hill-partners-acquir...
  • Nasrudith 7y ago
    Yeah it reads like a clumsy hit piece - not that the industry doesn't have problems but it falls so short of professional writing standards you have to ask if they get paid for it.
    • jp555 7y ago
      The Journalism industry can't go on like this.
• vectorEQ 7y ago
  once the race to the bottom ends someday we'll have companies making good games again. there's 1 or 2 big studios who still take time for stuff, but most large ones are pretty much hitting the bottom now and people are stopping to buy their games and content. once people are fed up enough and sales take a big enough dive they will wake up. - so in reality, gamers, it's in your hands to change the industry. not in the developers hands. they just make what sells. so buy what's good and they will focus on that.
• inamberclad 7y ago
  Kotaku has been publishing this kind of article for years. Most video game journalism is about creating enough content to keep an audience with a microsecond attention span. Doing so requires creating hype, controversy, and doubt.
• jhanschoo 7y ago
  The article makes two points, one centered around the profitability of making games under current business models, the other one centered around the environmental impact of the newer games-as-a-sevice models. The point that the traditional games publishing model is bad for profits holds, but the point about environmentalism is ridiculous. First, high environmental impact would mean nothing for the ability for the GaasS models to draw a profit. Secondly, GaaS should actually be good for the environment. The alternative to computing in data centers is computing in personal computers and consoles, which leads to worse environmental outcomes both in the hardware itself and in their lower efficiency. Besides, computing in data centers leads to more opportunities for efficiency since redundant computations among different devices and users can be parallelized. The main environmental impact here is one the author completely misses: the energy required for the bandwidth of streaming videos.
  • matteuan 7y ago
    I agree with you. I would add another huge efficiency advantage of a data-center over a console, that is better heat dissipation.
    • moate 7y ago
      Also shipping. You only need to ship the platform in a GaaS model once, and you build a data center once. From there you're just uploading/transferring code. With physical games you need to produce the games and ship them each time a new one comes out. Not to mention packaging etc.
      • wilg 7y ago
        Well, but most games are delivered digitally now (https://www.statista.com/statistics/190225/digital-and-physical-game-sales-in-the-us-since-2009/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/190225/digital-and-physi...). I wonder how the bandwidth to deliver the full game compares to the bandwidth to stream video of the game if you're playing it 100% over the internet.
        • 7y ago
• golemotron 7y ago
  > Artists who work on gory cinematics integral to games like Mortal Kombat suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. This makes me wonder how surgeons and morticians manage. Surely something must be done for them too.
  • taneq 7y ago
    Dunno about surgeons, but first responders absolutely do get PTSD from repeated exposure to horrible things.
  • SolaceQuantum 7y ago
    Pitch black humor and medical school training to dissociate appropriately from the patient. But it's still very difficult, psychologically.
  • raverbashing 7y ago
    For "regular occurrences" I think surgeons just abstract it (as it's part of their job) but as the sibling comment, them, and first responders can get PTSD in some occasions. Medical School does some job of filtering those who can abstract it from the ones who can't (I'm sure I wouldn't be a good fit)
• pdpi 7y ago
  I don't think the tangent off into the topic of cloud-based computing makes a lot of sense. PUE is a measure of efficiency for the data centre itself — how much power is going into computing vs the data centre. It says nothing about the efficiency of the hardware itself, which can easily beat the efficiency of consumer hardware by enough of a margin that it burns overall less energy. One obvious place for such savings is storage — there's no reason you need a separate copy of a game for each compute node that's running it! Then they run into the problem of e-waste, which is precisely the sort of thing that cloud-based/streaming consoles would actually make better!
• zeofig 7y ago
  More incoherent gibbering from kotaku. There are plenty of good games. Obviously the AAA titles are quite garbage these days, but who cares?
• izzydata 7y ago
  I'd honestly prefer the games industry collapsed and maybe started over. This whole concept of massive thousand people teams working on huge scale games that take many years to finish only manages to produce games devoid of passion. Back when games were made by small teams where every individual was able to contribute significantly to the game did it feel right. Obviously that is just my personal opinion, but despite games getting more graphically impressive they have been getting worse overall.
  • lcfcjs2 7y ago
    Found the old guy. Try new games like God of War, Last of Us, Spiderman, Horizon Zero Dawn. These are some of the greatest gaming experiences of all time, not just this generation.
• bag531 7y ago
  The game industry needs to unionize.
• kraig911 7y ago
  I wonder what if video games can be contrasted against data we know for book publishing. There was a time books were a huge novelty. Now we only talk about the ones that a REALLY good. When I was younger almost ANY video game impressed me. Nowadays not so much. Funny thing is to the industry is doubling down on graphics graphics graphics. But damn it if I'm the only one who thinks they're just not fun anymore. I mean have you guys tried Anthem? It's awful. Where is the goofiness that is battle toads. The narrative that is FFVI. The precision that is a flight sim. There are obviously exceptions and some amazing games. (Witcher III, BOTW, anything Mario, Stardew) But it feels like the big publishers still think it's 2003.
  • phalangion 7y ago
    The goofiness, narrative, and precision are all there in noon-AAA games. Lots of games have plenty of each.
  • SolaceQuantum 7y ago
    "Where is the goofiness that is battle toads. The narrative that is FFVI. The precision that is a flight sim. There are obviously exceptions and some amazing games. (Witcher III, BOTW, anything Mario, Stardew) But it feels like the big publishers still think it's 2003." The indie scene, man. I've been following Failbetter Games, and they've got so much narrative over three games that are essentially about exploring a big crazy world and all the people living in it, fully fleshing out the people you meet, their pasts and presents, and what their lives say about the world they live in. I've never been so mildly horrified with my own unintended consequences and revelations in that 'world' since I dropped the companion cube into the incinerator in Portal.
    • baud147258 7y ago
      > I've never been so mildly horrified with my own unintended consequences and revelations in that 'world' since I dropped the companion cube into the incinerator in Portal. For me, dropping the companion cube just meant that the door opened and I could continue to move forward.
• CoolGuySteve 7y ago
  The argument about the $60 price point seems specious to me. Video games have massive economies of scale and the market has been growing steadily faster than inflation, meaning that while the price point has been the same, the volume of sales have increased with a low marginal cost for each unit sold. Along with sheer sales volume, digital distribution has lowered publishing costs, created after-markets for DLC, and reduced the secondary market. Digital distribution also allows for much greater price elasticity. If anything, you could argue that digital publishers like Steam, PlayStation Store, etc, should lower their cut, but it seems like that's starting to happen on the PC with increased competition in the space from Epic, Origin, etc. I think the real problem with the industry is that video games are a hit business where a handful of games make almost all the profit. The best way to profit in a space like this is to crank out content as cheaply as possible. This is evidenced by the fact that game developers have been working crunch since back in the 90s when a $50 game was worth $80 in 2018 dollars. Edit: Why not comment instead of censoring with downvotes?
  • ThrowawayR2 7y ago
    > Video games have massive economies of scale In what way? The code and art/music/voice/story assets are custom for each game; the only thing that might be shareable is the engine.
    • CoolGuySteve 7y ago
      Like I said, cost per unit sold is almost nothing.
      • deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
  • Newtonip 7y ago
    Even though volume has gone up, the cost of making a triple AAA game is much higher than it use to be. Current day triple AAA titles are way more complex; they feature a ton of professional acting, highly detailed artwork, etc. Also, as you point out, inflation has gone up so that accounts in part why the unit price has not changed much. Even taking all that into account, perhaps it still doesn't justify the price they sell at. In that case, they may be selling it much higher than they need to because they can. People still buy games prices at $60.
• lowbloodsugar 7y ago
  I only play single player games, and I have more games than I have time. I've completed Horizon Zero Dawn 5 times. Just finished Days Gone. My kid finished indie classic Celeste earlier this year and is grinding through Dead Cells. I didn't like Last of Us, personally (too depressing), but it did quite well, I'm told. I've got Monster Hunter and Sekiro downloaded and waiting for me to get bored of Days Gone. I read that HZD has made a profit (after development and marketing costs) of over $300m, having sold 10m copies. Finally played an Assassins Creed game this year. Microtransactioned to death. Never buying one of those again.
• rndmize 7y ago
  This article is very questionable. > When you adjust for inflation, the retail cost of video games has never been cheaper, and it’s been this way for some time. The $60 price point for a standard big-budget release has held steady for nearly 15 years... I guess the constantly growing addressable market just doesn't matter? The human cost has nothing to do with price points or gamer expectations and everything to do with supply and demand. Lots of people want to make games. Developers/publishers take advantage. > you’ll get a stark—if unscientific—picture of how each big publisher’s release slate has thinned out in the last five years, relying on recurring cash cows like sports games and annualized franchises and little else. In 2008, those three publishers released 98 games; in 2018 they released just 28, not including expansions. Yeah, because the big publishers _aren't needed_. The tooling a platform like Steam provides has made it much easier to self-publish, or use a small-time publisher instead - your game doesn't need to be on retail shelves to be successful anymore, there's tons of free marking channels available today, all of which combine to make publishers less necessary. > The foremost takeaway is that while data centers are growing in number, their energy consumption is starting to plateau out of necessity, as the dramatic increase in cloud computing has actually forced tech companies to become more efficient. This has literally nothing to do with gaming or its sustainability. As the computing/electronics industry moves in more efficient or green directions, gaming hardware (not even the game industry) will follow. There's problems with the game industry - gambling mechanics, exploitation of "whales", discovery/marketing/shovelwear, how to handle growing international audiences, and so on, but I don't see any of these mentioned in the article.
• tibbon 7y ago
  I am floored at how cheap games are these days. Ultima IV had a street price of $50-55; in 1985. That's ~$130 in 2019. Teams were far far smaller then. Of course a "successful" game was also a far different standard; as within 4 years of release it had sold only 400,000 copies; despite being a pretty great game. Whenever people talk about how expensive games are I feel very very old, because games (and the systems) used to actually be expensive. The C64 was an amazing budget system, and was originally $595. That's like $1600 today. Yes it was a "computer" as well, but people balk at the price of $300 systems today and call $1000 computers too expensive.
  • trilila 7y ago
    From what i gather, what most people find expensive are addons that you have to pay for, to be able to continuously play the game.
    • HNisCurated 7y ago
      They did this to me. And I never went back to consoles or AAA producers.
      • trilila 7y ago
        Good. As a wannabe indie game developer, this pleases me.
  • mr_crankypants 7y ago
    Teams were so much smaller. Ultima IV was about as big-budget as a video game got. Here are the credits for the DOS version: https://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/ultima-iv-quest-of-the-avatar/credits https://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/ultima-iv-quest-of-the-av... 19 people, total, for the original development and production on the Apple II version, plus the PC, Atari and Amiga ports.
    • kbumsik 7y ago
      > 19 people, total Still it was much smaller. Witcher 3 dev team is about 250.
• bensonn 7y ago
  I am probably not the standard gamer so all this is personal opinion. I am still playing Skyrim. I don't like FPS games, I don't like multi-player games and I don't like sports games. The $60 soft-cap makes sense. That is normally for the core game- Skyrim had three official add-ons, I think $5 each. Game developers have created bad reputations for themselves- you expect new games to be sold unfinished requiring huge updates right after release and to still be buggy for months afterwards. I tried Assassins Creed but within the first week I had multiple ~10GB updates, never made it further than the first 10 minutes of the game. Micro-transactions and in-game advertising are probably subconsciously factored into a games prices by customers now. I stopped buying EA games because every loading screen or background object had "EA" written on it (golf). $60 used to be the purchase price of a disc you bought and you owned the game, pop it in and it works. $60 is now the price for a download link to "rent" the game until the publisher or host decides to no longer keep it up and running. I hate "cloud" gaming. Friday night at 8pm and you decide to play some videos- forced 12GB update means the game will be ready to play sometime Monday morning, assuming the update didn't mess things up. If your Internet is down, sorry, can't play the games you bought and downloaded. Of course customers aren't going to spend more than $60 for a broken buggy game filled with ads that they don't truly own. Bethesda had moved on from Skyrim but fans have not. (Hopefully TES6 stays similar to the series) 8 years after release people are still playing the game. New mods and full add-ons created by fans are still coming out. The market is there for quality single-player games. I stopped reading when the article started talking about energy.
  • Havoc 7y ago
    Check out Witcher 3 if you haven't. Thought it would be hard to top Skyrim...but actually...
• oneepic 7y ago
  >kotaku opinion article about the games industry at large Like hearing a 4-year old talk about philosophy.
  • Sydney_ 7y ago
    Your reply should be at the top. LOL
• CivBase 7y ago
  > In short, the single-player game was not sustainable. So why should we think the current model is? The single-player game is very sustainable. It's just not as lucrative unless you double-down on in-game monetization like Ubisoft does. Devolver Digital is plenty stable, even though it makes a tiny fraction of the revenue we see from "AAA" publishers. > In 2008, those three publishers released 98 games; in 2018 they released just 28, not including expansions. Well there's the problem. If you focus all of your effort on a few large-scale projects, you will have to milk those projects for all you can. There's still a huge market for small and medium-scale projects, though. The indie market is thriving. > Independent developers, meanwhile, continue to fight for the smallest slice of an impossibly crowded market. How is this an indication of a struggling industry? This just tells me that the market is easy to break into, which should be hailed as a positive. Of course "indie" studios aren't going to individually be responsible for a large slice of the market. They don't have the budgets to fund massive projects with a ton of marketing. However, I'd be pretty interested in seeing just how much money "indie" titles as a whole bring in and how that has compared to the rest of the market over time. I'd guess it's grown significantly over time and that's the real reason why "AAA" publishers struggle with smaller scale games. There's a reason "AAA" publishers like EA want to be associated with some of these games. > And Sony already offers a streaming service, PlayStation Now, which is likely to expand in the next generation. If PlayStation Now is anything to go by, I wouldn't put a lot of stock in xCloud or Stadia. There's a lot of buzz around it now, but I doubt game streaming will get any mainstream traction for a long time. > [a bunch of talk about data center power efficiency and climate change] And how does this compare to the amount of energy spent running games natively? I'm sure Microsoft's, Sony's, and Google's servers are configured to utilize hardware much more efficiently than my gaming PC. This seems like an out-of-nowhere tangent to me and the article doesn't provide enough information about it to really go anywhere so it devolves into lamenting the "current political climate". I think this article makes the mistake of conflating the state of several large "AAA" publishers with the state of the games industry as a whole. I've long-since stopped caring about almost anything the "Big Three" (EA, Activision, and Ubisoft) have a hand in, and most other "AAA" publishers have damaged their reputation so much that I have practically zero anticipation for new games. There are many things companies in the gaming industry should do better, but I don't think the industry as a whole is in near as dire a state as the author describes. I wouldn't shed a tear if most of the "AAA" publishers disappeared tomorrow. There's still plenty of great games coming out from developers and publishers with much cleaner reputations.
• komali2 7y ago
  > Let’s run down the Big Three. We’re more than halfway through 2019, and Electronic Arts has only published one single-player game, the indie Sea of Solitude. Last year was much the same, with two indies as its only single-player releases: Fe and Unraveled 2. Activision’s portfolio of single-player games looks even thinner: Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is the only exclusively single-player, non-remake game that the publisher has released Right, but, isn't that ok? I don't want to go FIFA on games like Sekiro. I like it better when a team is given 3-5 years to churn out a dank single player experience.
• HEEEEEEEEEEEE 7y ago
  Kotaku's content is so heavily editorialized that it's hard to take seriously. Every time I read an article it seems that I'm being told how to feel about something rather than being informed about it.
  • gdulli 7y ago
    You know that this is explicitly and intentionally an editorial piece, right? I'm not sure what you're criticizing other than something completely fundamental about how all journalism works.
    • HEEEEEEEEEEEE 7y ago
      You know that editorial pieces can be informative, right? This article is largely comprised of unsupported opinions, and definitely against the "deeply interesting" criterion this site strives for.
      • gdulli 7y ago
        I find a 2000 word article more interesting than a few sentences of vague, partially tautological, and non-constructive criticisms from an account created an hour ago only for that purpose.
        • HEEEEEEEEEEEE 7y ago
          "Deeply interesting" is not a prescribed criterion for comments.
        • trump2020 7y ago
          Thank you for exposing a Russian troll, fellow redditor! I wish I could upvote you twice! Have some gold instead!
• metalrain 7y ago
  Amount of electronic waste and low percentage of recycling seems quite big issue, much bigger than problems in gaming. How many phones, laptops, tvs, desktop pcs, consoles, music devices, cameras and other related devices have you stopped using lets say past 10 years? How many have you recycled?
• throwaway66666 7y ago
  I am going to be downvoted, but this needs to be said. The problem with the indie developers is that many of them are driven by greed and only greed. But that is hidden behind a veil of "we are the underdogs, passionate people, like you!". In reality, it's just a job like any other, and the "we are passionate", is the equivalent of "we are changing the world by... uhh disrupting!" that startup kool-aid drinkers say. Let me give you an example. I dated a twitter semi-famous indie dev a while ago. She has a day job but makes games on the side. I have a day job and I make music on the side. I remember I was in a room with her, and was looking in ordering Aztec death whistles (it's a whistle that sounds like a human scream), to use into my music. She asked me "oh and how many people will like that?" To which I answered, "Right now I have 10 listeners. After the death whistles maybe I will have 5" and grinned. I make music for me, not for anyone else. If somebody happens to like it, that's fine. It's a hobby and a form of self-expression, like people cook for themselves or practice archery for themselves. I am not looking into becoming famous. In a sense, I am free to create what i want, and I am limited only but my skills and what I can do, not by what I must do. She looked troubled... So I stopped and observed. She was looking at how many copies a game sold, and was chatting on FB with another on-twitter-all-day indie dev, about how many copies his game sold. Then she proclaimed that the next title would be different, way more appealing to the masses. I put my guitar down, stopped trying to sing "love will tear us apart" but in tuvan throat singing! And proclaimed, wait you 're selling out? How can you be selling out, the game doesn't even exist yet!! She replied "So what? There is no same in wanting to make a good living from your art. Not everybody is like you and is happy with just... playing. Never advancing to the next stage. Never making something meaningful.". I WAS SHOCKED. I still am. No wonder it didn't work out in the end. But... she told me, she had started making games because the game industry was full of stereotypes. Boys are the space marine, and girls play barbie's mini games, barbie pets her horse, barbie goes on a date with Ken, bullshit. That she wanted to make a difference, it was her passion, she wanted to prove that there can be fun games that are not gender-biased and that everyone can enjoy. I thought it was a noble, experimentation, passion project, like music is for me. No. No, making games is not the end itself. Making games is means to an end. Indie devs are greed-driven. Not passion driven. I hanged out with a few of them in GDC this year. They all care about money. I felt like I was at a dinner with C* level people that just like gossiping about IPOs and how much money some friends, or friends of friends of friends raised. All about money. "This game sold 700k copies!!! It uses unity assets". "That guy from romania made X million dollars!?!?". There was a guy, who put a game on early access, then delayed the game's release for 10 years, because he made enough money to buy a house in San Francisco, and just did... nothing afterwards. Just talks to people with a "holier than thou" attitude. Meanwhile the game aged so bad, it went from a 7/10 to a 3/10 when it finally got out 9 years late!!!! How dare you! All these people who paid you because they believed in you, and you just shit on them when you hit a certain $$$ in your savings account. But I guess... why wouldn't he. He already accomplished his end goal of MONEY. Early access, what a shitty thing. No self-respecting musician would say; Here are the first 2 tracks of the album. And some drum tracks from the 3rd and 4th piece. Maybe in 5 years you will get the bass track for the 3rd piece too! No movie director would say; we released the green screen version, and when we raise enough money you will get to see the dragons and the elves. Only game devs do that. The inherent problem I see with indie devs, is that they lie to their audience as much as themselves as well. When I see the new GTA V game, I know what I am getting into. I will pay $60 to run over some people. But with indie devs I am being schooled about the exploration and experimentation. About feelings, about difficult subjects that noone dared to mention in game medium before. I am intrigued, I am captivated, I am in love! And then... you find out that that indie-game, scooby-do-esque pulling the mask off it was Michael Bay, and Michael Bay's 30th transfomers film all along! All about money, all about making investors happy! Music has forever changed. We musicians accepted that we won't be rich from our music, so we are liberated to scavenge for a few bucks to rent a van and go touring playing in 20-people shows. Usually when I hang out with musicians, we end up smoking weed and committing to jam sessions that may never happen. And then everyone gets really really excited when I pull the death whistle out.
• stcredzero 7y ago
  studios shuttered, developers burned out, and toxic work culture fostered environments hostile to marginalized people People have been banging on about this for quite some time. One would figure that someone would put together a team that isn't toxic, then succeed. There must be some kind of outside force which makes the whole industry toxic. Probably the same market pressures which turn people into frenemies in other media industries.
• pablok2 7y ago
  Starts with the state of the game industry and goes on to climate change... ok?